Windows 8 A Nightmare But You Are Awake

“The worst gesture might be the one to reveal the list of currently running applications: you need to first swipe from the screen’s left edge, and then immediately reverse direction and do a small swipe the other way, and finally make a 90-degree turn to move your finger to a thumbnail of the desired application. The slightest mistake in any of these steps gives you a different result.

The UI is littered with swipe ambiguity, where similar (or identical) gestures have different outcomes depending on subtle details in how they’re activated or executed. For example, start swiping from the right to the left and you will either scroll the screen horizontally or reveal the charm bar, depending on exactly where your finger first touched the screen. This was very confusing to the users in our study.”

Nielsen turned actual users loose on a bunch of “8” PCs and reported folks were dazed and confused. The OS is “Windows” in name only and nothing that has been learned in decades of GUIs has been improved in the latest release. It’s “square one”, literally, all over again. GNU/Linux with XFCE4 and xdm would be a much more comfortable environment. I know people who hated “7”. They are not going to love “8” either. Ordinary consumers are now demanding choice and they aren’t getting what they want from M$.

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About Robert Pogson

I am a retired teacher in Canada. I taught in the subject areas where I have worked for almost forty years: maths, physics, chemistry and computers. I love hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, too.

In 1998, Bill Gates told Fortune, “As long as they [Chinese people] are going to steal [software], we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

One decade later, it’s Chinese pirates 1, Microsoft 0. In May, a frustrated CEO Steve Ballmer told employees that, “Microsoft’s total revenue in China, population 1.3 billion, is less than what it gets in the Netherlands, a country of fewer than 17 million.”

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.